The world's local wank

Marketers often place the horse firmly before the cart.

If you really think that spending millions on papering the world with fanciful tosh about your "brand" helps, it's not a bad idea to make sure that the reality approximates, however vaguely, to the promise.

As one of our friends has just discovered, this is often not the case.

She is moving from Rome to Paris, having previously worked here in London, where she still has a flat. So the other day, having arranged to rent the flat, she wandered into her London branch of HSBC - rather pleased that being with "the world's local bank" it would be no problem opening an account in Paris.

They had a queue there, of course, to direct you to the right place to do what you want when you enter. I have never understood why you can no longer go and ask any cashier as we used to, but still. I suspect the banks' high-ups now operate on the assumption that the customers and the staff are as moronic as they have so spectacularly proved themselves to be. Or maybe they just think we prefer machines to people. Personally, I don't. And I also think that if their employees were given credit for being intelligent, they would rise to the challenge. Not everyone is as thick as a senior banker. That would be impossible.

When she asked the man whose job it was to help how she could open her new French account, he was quite at a loss. It seemed as though nobody in the world's local bank had ever told him such a bizarre question might come up.

So he said he would go and find out more about what was involved, and give her a number to call - which he did - but if she wished she could join a queue of people waiting to find out the answers to such tricky questions. How long, she wondered, would that take? He said he would go and find that out too, and trotted off.

In the meantime another helpful employee sidled up and said "If you open it here they'll charge you £100. You should wait till you get to Paris." Then the man came back and said if she wanted to join the queue it would take an hour to an hour and a half. There's service for you, eh?

Well, if the world's local bank can't even handle a simple thing like that, where do you go? Your local kebab stand? It seems that like all the other banks, besides not doing too well on the basics of lending and borrowing - thus landing us all in the shit - HSBC can't even manage the simplest of tasks in what they claim to be their area of special expertise without trying to rip you off.

So she is going to see what happens when she gets to Paris. I'm sure she won't have to wait too long before they try to rip her off too. Though oddly enough when I had an account with a French bank, they were efficient, helpful and no more rapacious than you might expect.

They even entertained all us customers in the village hall once a year, with lots of free booze. On balance, I think I'd prefer my local bank to be local, thank you.

I also think that before you claim to be anything, you do it. When we get a client, we ask them what makes them different or better than their competitors, not what they fondly imagine should make them so; and we don't just take their word for it: whenever possible we try to see if it is true.

This will bring tears to your eyes

John Walter was quite right to scold me yesterday -- and I shall talk about this again. In the meantime, something entirely different, sent by my friend George in San Francisco.

Whatever happened to The Spectator?

A couple of weeks ago I picked up my copy of The Spectator, a respected journal which has been around in one form or another since the early 1700’s.

Its founders, Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, were two of the best essayists in English who ever lived. I still strive to write as well.

A few years ago I even wrote a marketing plan for the magazine, which either deliberately or by coincidence it has followed almost exactly ever since, and as a result, I was delighted to see, turned a profit for the first time in its history

I started subscribing to the modern version almost exactly 30 years ago. At that time the novelist Graham Greene said it was the best written journal in the English language - and God knows, he was a better judge than I could ever hope to be.

The column on wine by Auberon Waugh was alone worth the price. The Low Life column by Jeffrey Bernard, who liked a drink or two, was called "a suicide note in weekly installments" and was so popular it led to a hit play called "Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell" featuring Peter O'Toole.

That is his his picture at the top which shows him doing what made him so unwell so often. We actually drank in the same pub and even, I discovered, slept with same woman, although I never knew it till he wrote about her in one of his columns. My God, she got me into a lot of trouble - but that is another story.

Anyhow, moving swiftly on, the old mag has gone downhill since then; and what I saw in this issue persuaded me it really is time to stop reading it. It was an interview by the editor with a girl called Lily Allen.

Now, if you want to know anything about Lily Allen, you really don't need to look in The Spectator. You just get a copy of Scrubbers'r’Us weekly and you’ll soon see her with all the other C-listers lurching drunkenly out of clubs in the Kings Road at 3 a.m. She's just a fairly good pop singer with acting pretensions, a penchant for being rude to people and absolutely nothing interesting to say about anything.

Whatever has happened to The Spectator? It still has some fine writers – Paul Johnson, perhaps our finest living journalist; Rod Liddle, perhaps our funniest – but the average is far, far below what it once was.

It really is going to hell in a handcart. So much so that I use one of its Diary Pieces in a course on how to write that I run for public servants. The piece in question is a faultless demonstration of how not to write good English, banged out by a woman called Joanna Shields who is "president" of a thing called Bebo.

"How many examples of cliche and jargon can you find in this?" I ask my students. Even the most modest toiler in the smallest district council in England has no trouble in finding plenty.

No editor worth his salt would even consider running a word this woman wrote. So how come the editor of The Spectator runs such tripe? Maybe because he imagines his readers want to know anything - anything at all - about Lily Allen.

A shame.

Stupid – or what?

This is a very obviously posed picture of a rather unsuccessful bank robber called Willie Sutton being arrested in New York about 70 years ago.

Shifty looking bugger, isn't he? Today he'd probably be a retired investment advisor.

I often quote him in my seminars.

He was caught so often that eventually a detective asked him why he kept robbing banks. “Because that’s where the money is,” he replied.

This came to mind when I read a headline the other day which showed me that no matter how stupid, he was smarter than Gordon Brown or Alastair Darling, who are so thick they have not yet grasped the simple fact that people always go where the money is.

Britain’s National Health Service is paying out £800 million to foreign nurses and doctors. They are needed because the ones we train are going abroad where – guess what? – they get paid more money.

No prizes for suggesting the solution.

Incidentally another headline revealed that the Great Bloated Haggis and Waggly Eyebrows are pissed off because the banks are still not lending money.

This is because banks can only lend money if they have some. Right now they don’t. They used it all up on dodgy investments to would-be property millionaires and assorted American crooks. Asking them to lend what they don’t have is insane (unless you’re a politician).

Please don't run away with the idea that I think the current lot have a monopoly on economic ineptitude. In the '80s and '90s Thatcher and Major gave away state industries in the most fatuous way conceivable in three ways.

First they under priced the shares - so all the people who really understood investment bought them like crazy - in short, went where the money was.

Second, they squandered millions on silly advertising to the whole world when all they had to do was to create interest through PR (not hard with a story like that) and insert letters to everyone in the country, with their utility bills. When you're about to pay your electricity bill you don't have to be a genius to understand that selling electricity is a good business.

Third, in some cases they created a situation where there was no real competition - the railways are a perfect example. How can you lose with no competition? Especially if whenever things get tricky the government bails you out - with our money.

The trouble with politicians besides congenital dishonesty is that most have done little or nothing in life but politics, so they have no idea how anything works. They think "policies", "initiatives" and "strategies" are all you need. They mistake looking good for doing good.

Most people in this country (and I imagine many others) are asking themselves one simple question: "How exactly, in detail, are you going to make things happen?" None of the rascals have a clue. Cameron is going to help savers. Who will pay? Where will the money come from?

The funny thing is that it's not a hard question to answer. To give one example, billions are squandered on the entirely pointless and wasteful process of taxing poor people on the one hand, giving them subsidies with the other and paying people to shuffle the money around.

What this achieves is simple: it actively discourages people from working, encourages them to scrounge, destroys their self-respect and creates a swarm of time-serving bureaucrats who would be better off doing proper jobs.

Incidentally, for Australian readers, I see that since he got in Kevin Rudd has done exactly what I predicted at the time. Nothing - except create a lot of committees and make a few fatuous gestures - like apologising to the Aboriginals.

Apologies do nothing except make politically correct twats feel good about themselves. Those who would appreciate them died long, long ago.

New Year Buffoonery

While the rest of you were no doubt making pious New Year resolutions, I was out doing what I do best: making a fool of myself.

(In case you're wondering, the picture being so blurred, I'm the one on the left. The one on the right, with the heavy beard, is not really my new best friend. It was a fancy dress party.)

Talking about fools, the recession has not quenched their enthusiasm in the wacky world of marketing.

A few months ago some halfwits in a meeting (probably devoted to brand values) decided it would be a really neat idea to take a venerable insurance firm that's been around for 211 years and change its name to something that sounds like a dodgy Swiss health tonic.

And so the country is plastered with hoardings and the television channels replete with commercials telling us that Norwich Union is about to become Aviva, as if anyone gives a shit. Nice one, boys. Are you friends with the idiots who decided to call the Royal Mail "Consignia"?

For that matter, does anyone (except the shareholders who subsidise this nonsense) give a shit about the ads that a bank called Santander is running saying "We are stronger. We are closer. We are Santander." These ads feature Lewis Hamilton, the well-known boy racer and financial wizard. They are what David Ogilvy called "flatulent puffery", and I call "kissing the chairman's fat posterior in public".

Talking of which, alas, I may never see the sequel I really recommend - "We are marooned so far up our own arse it will take an SAS search party to find us." However, as Santander has been buying lame British banks like there's no tomorrow, I have high hopes for a few announcements saying something like, "Er, we have financial indigestion and maybe we shouldn't have bought that lot of deadbeat tossers."

But enough of this badinage. Here is the 100% bad taste joke I promised before Christmas.

Vicar (checking into hotel): I hope the porn channel in my room is disabled."

Receptionist: "No, it's normal, you fucking pervert."